* Reflections on the Anarchist PrincipleTom Jennings1:125/111The following is the opening essay in "THE BLACK FLAG OF ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS", available from Employee Theft Press,($2.50 from 1369 Haight St, San Francisco CA 94117) -- all funds from the sale of this pamphlet go to "WITHOUT BORDERS ANARCHISTCONFERENCE & FESTIVAL", to be held in San Francisco this July 20 - 25.Reflections on the Anarchist Principleby Paul Goodman"Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: thatvaluable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response ofindividuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented bythe historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs,whether political, economic, military, religious, moral,pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results fromcoercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy,jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization,excessive planning, etc. Anarchists want to increase intrinsicfunctioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is a social-psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications."Depending on varying historical conditions that present variousthreats to the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid theiremphasis in varying places: sometimes agrarian, sometimes free-city and guild-oriented; sometimes technological, sometimes anti-technological; sometimes Communist, sometimes affirming property;sometimes individual, sometimes collective; sometimes speaking ofLiberty as an almost absolute good, sometimes relying on customand 'nature'. Nevertheless, despite these differences, anarchistsseldom fail to recognize each other, and they do not consider thedifferences to be incompatibilities. Consider a crucial modernproblem, violence. Guerrilla fighting has been a classicalanarchist technique; yet, especially where, in modern conditions,*any* violent means tends to reinforce centralism andauthoritarianism, anarchists have tended to see the beauty ofnon-violence."Now the anarchist principle is by and large true(1). And farfrom being 'utopian' or a 'glorious failure', it has proveditself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In theperiod of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise byjoint stock companies were anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill ofrights were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. Thefree cities and corporate law in the feudal system wereanarchist. At present, the civil rights movement in the UnitedStates has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist.And so forth, down to details like free access in publiclibraries. Of course, to later historians these things do notseem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were regarded assuch and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats ofchaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to theactual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There *cannot*be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing apermanent state of things 'anarchist'. It is always a continualcoping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure thatpast freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, asfree enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism,or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts,cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems."Footnote(1) "I, and Other anarchists, would except certain states of temporary emergency, is we can be confident that the emergency is *temporary*. We might except certain simplistic logisticarrangements, like ticketing or metric standards or tax-collection, if we can be confident that the administration, the'secretariat', will not begin to run the show. And we mightexcept certain 'natural monopolies', like epidemic control,water-supply, etc."First published in ANARCHY 62 (April 1966)